Ex-economy minister Emmanuel Macron steps into France’s political void
>> Insults and rumours keep coming: His speeches are too long and full of feelgood banalities. He does not have a real programme. His time in government was a failure. He is secretly gay. He is developing a personality cult. He favours capitalism, and besides, he is too young.
If any surer sign was needed that Emmanuel Macron, the 39-year-old former economy minister, is the new front-runner in France’s presidential race, look no further than the concentrated volley of wild attacks against him. Even the Russians, via pro-Kremlin websites, are piling on.
France’s two major parties, on the right and the left, are in self-inflicted ruin, the first downed by the corruption scandal surrounding Francois Fillon, and the second by a utopian dreamer, Benoit Hamon.
Mr Macron has glided artfully unto the breach. He is increasingly seen as the one who will turn back the tide of authoritarian populism, the nonpolitician who will defeat Marine Le Pen of the far-right National Front.
But perhaps the only thing more improbable for France than electing Ms Le Pen would be to elect Mr Macron.
Yet Mr Macron has never been elected to anything. He served two largely unsuccessful years directing France’s vast but sluggish economy, with scant accomplishment in his wake. He is not a member of either major party, or of any party, and is disliked by many of the Socialists in whose government he served. He claims to transcend the parties.
While he has pushed a message that includes doses from left, right and centre — maintain France’s social protections, keep the country in the European Union and lighten the burden on business — it is a strategy that has also made him the candidate offering something just about everyone can hate. Or it has risked making him into a mannequin candidate who stands for nothing.
Mr Macron is married to his former high school drama teacher who is 24 years his senior, and he caused a scandal in his provincial hometown, Amiens, by wooing her. He is a former investment banker with Rothschild & Co, low on the list of most admired professions.
Yet Mr Macron and his wife, Brigitte, have been on the cover of Paris Match four times in the past year.
On Monday, he brought the gay rumours into the open, joking about them in a speech, to the surprise of French media: “It’s disagreeable for Brigitte,” Macron said. “She’s asking how I pull this off, physically. She shares my life from morning to night — and I’ve never paid her for it,” he added, slyly evoking the nepotism scandal engulfing Mr Fillon for having kept his wife on the public payroll for no detectable work.
Overflow crowds and packed rallies in recent weeks have surprised commentators. In Lyon last weekend 8,000 people packed into the sports stadium to hear him, forcing thousands more out on to the grounds to watch on giant screens.
He spoke for nearly two hours, his face turned up in a kind of rapture, frequently addressing the crowd as his friends.
There were many vague promises of hope and unity, and above all, delight in the huge crowd that had come out. “Your presence, this wall of presences around me, this is living proof that we really are here,” Mr Macron said, beaming.
“It’s a demonstration of desire,” he told the crowd, “the desire to picture a new future.”
In his speech Mr Macron claimed the mantle of left, right, centre, Charles de Gaulle, and other factions, as well as writers like Émile Zola, Charles Péguy and René Char, all under the floating aegis of a “will to assemble” and “reconciliation.”
“And the Gaullists,” he said, “did they not carry in their genes this will to assemble, this will not to capitulate to any faction, this incompatibility with conservatism, hatred of the other, and of division?”
The crowd erupted in cheers of “Macron, President!”
He spoke of lowering taxes on companies, restraining capitalism, swiped at the “obscurantism” of Trump’s America and denounced the National Front for “betraying fraternity because it detests those faces that don’t resemble it”.
Mostly, it wasn’t concise or specific, but the crowd had not come for that.
In contrast to Ms Le Pen, Macron has been mocked for being the darling of the “bourgeois bohemians”, and for his awkwardness among the working classes. He was egged in a communist suburb last year and admonished a young man to get a job to pay for a suit.
But those who braved the cold in Lyon — doctors, professors, self-described “company heads,” civil servants and many young people — appeared seduced by his highflown rhetoric.